I'm a Bible-believing Christian who believes Creation was made in six days as we experience days. I haven't had time yet to read the whole article, but just want to respond on the Neil deGrasse Tyson meme, which is this:
"You know, one of the signs of the second coming, is that the stars will fall out of the sky and fall to earth. To even write that means you don’t know what those things are. You have no concept of what the actual universe is. So everybody who tried to make proclamations about the physical universe based on bible passages got the wrong answer."
Now Tyson's conclusions here utilize faulty logic (It is part of a longer statement, but I'm going to limit my response right now to just this quote). He uses a tactic that, in my experience, is commonly used against Christianity by non-believers, and it's logically wrong. What that tactic is is to say that Christian beliefs are internally inconsistent by misstating what Christian beliefs and arguments actually are.
There's the difference between truth and validity. Atheists often say they're attacking a Christian argument essentially on validity but then in the middle do a bait-and-switch. Now, according to Wikipedia's page on validity, this is a logically valid syllogism:
All cups are green.
Socrates is a cup.
Therefore, Socrates is green.
Certainly the premises and conclusion can be questioned on the basis of truth, but in terms of internal consistency, the syllogism itself is perfectly consistent and so logically valid. Assuming the premises are true, the conclusion necessarily follows.
Now here is the logically valid argument by Christians concerning what the Bible says about stars falling from Heaven and similar issues:
If God is all powerful, including having absolute control over our physical universe, then it's possible for Him to do anything that would seem to go against the physical laws of this universe.
In Christian belief, God is just that powerful.
Therefore, in Christian belief, it's possible for God to do anything that would seem to go against the physical laws of this universe.
But Neil deGrasse Tyson instead suggests that Christians - not atheists, but Christians - are instead arguing this:
If human science-based belief about the universe supports the literal truth of every passage in the Bible, then the Bible is true.
Human science-based belief about the universe does NOT support the literal truth of every passage in the Bible.
Therefore, the Bible is true (which, of course, isn't the proper valid conclusion).
So then, suggests Tyson, "Christians aren't being logically consistent. They reject the logically valid conclusion" (that's not a quote, but what his underlying argument is). And that's the problem with arguments such as these, the bait-and-switch.
I don't know how many times I've heard atheists tell Christians that we're being internally inconsistent in an argument, when a Christian claims something and the internal consistency of that claim assumes that God is all-powerful and supernatural. The non-believer acts like the Christian's argument assumes the opposite, that God ISN'T all-powerful and supernatural, and when the Christian points out that his argument does assume those things, the non-believer then says, "Well, He's not. There's absolutely no evidence for it. You're just using circular logic." So, apparently, the atheist wants to forbid the Christian from using those two premises.
Now it's fine for an atheist to make claims against the truth of the Christian's premises and then attempt to defend their own claims, but those other issues are simply irrelevant to whether or not the Christian is being internally consistent with his or her beliefs in such a case. Yet atheists never seem to recognize that what they're arguing is the same thing as saying that the syllogism above concerning Socrates and cups is invalid because the premises and conclusion aren't factually true. It's fine to debate the truth of a syllogism's premises themselves, such as in the syllogism above, whether or not God exists, what evidence might be there for His existence, and what Christians have to say about how stars could fall from heaven, and I would discuss all those issues as time permits, but those matters have no bearing on the validity of that syllogism.
First, you should certainly read the rest of the article.
Secondly, the problem with invoking a character you define as all-powerful like Yahweh is that it means no matter how much the observable evidence contradicts the claims of the Bible, you can just say "well it's true anyways because Yahweh is all-powerful and can make it true even though it doesn't look that way."
If Yahweh doesn't exist and Biblical supernatural claims are false, the invention of Yahweh is a pretty much perfect tactic to defend those claims against absolutely any amount of evidence to the contrary.
We could find Christ's bones in his tomb and you could say "Yahweh made it that way, Christ still ascended to heaven". We could go back in a time machine and observe that none of the Biblical miracles took place and you could say "Yahweh is concealing them from us so we must have faith, he can do anything" and so on. It is an assumption (and that's what it is, mind you) that makes your beliefs impossible to falsify to your satisfaction.
What if I were to do the same thing? As an example, let's say there is a being named Tim the God Eater. By definition, Tim eats deities of any kind, no matter how powerful. The existence of even one such God Eater like Tim would mean that Yahweh cannot exist, because if he did, Tim would've already eaten him long ago.
Remember, Tim is defined as being incorporeal. Intangible, invisible, impossible to detect with the senses or any scientific instruments. So you cannot prove Tim doesn't exist. And if Tim does exist, then Yahweh cannot. Do you see how that works?
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